Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Philosophy on the Fringes, a podcast that explores the philosophical dimensions of the strange and the mundane.
Speaker: We're your hosts, Megan Fritz and Frank Cabrera.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about the 1989 action film Roadhouse.
Speaker: We'll examine the limits of pacifism, the nature of pain, and whether you can find the meaning of life while being a bounce girl.
Speaker: Welcome back to the podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode, we're talking about a movie from 1989 starring Patrick Swayze called Roadhouse.
Speaker: And I am very excited for this episode.
Speaker: I'm a big Patrick Swayze fan.
Speaker: Patrick Swayze is probably best known for his work in Dirty Dancing.
Speaker: But I personally think this movie is better.
Speaker: Frank, what do you think?
Speaker: I do like the movie, but I can see why some people might think it's actually kind of cheesy.
Speaker: But before we get into any of that, we should probably tell the listeners what the movie's about.
Speaker: I bet most of them have not seen it.
Speaker: It's not... I don't think it's a very well-known movie.
Speaker: Yeah, you might wonder why we're doing this because this movie is, what, like 30 years old now at this point?
Speaker: Over 30.
Speaker: Yeah, but they are making a remake of this movie soon starring Jake Gyllenhaal.
Speaker: So this is, Roadhouse is going to be a current phenomenon soon.
Speaker: So this is not of mere antiquarian interest.
Speaker: We can only hope the remake has as much rich philosophical content as the original.
Speaker: Yeah, I doubt it.
Speaker: So in the original movie, the one we're talking about, Roadhouse, the basic plot is this.
Speaker: We have a character named Dalton.
Speaker: He's working as a bouncer in some bar.
Speaker: He's in New York City.
Speaker: He's in New York City.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: Frank knows all the details that I missed.
Speaker: So he's working as a bouncer in a bar in New York City, and he has kind of a reputation for being one of the best bouncers in, I don't know, the United States, I guess.
Speaker: He's well known as just an excellent bouncer who can really fix your bar up, take it from being a dangerous location to being a respectable establishment.
Speaker: So right at the beginning of the movie, Dalton gets this offer from a bar owner in Kansas City or in Jasper.
Speaker: Right outside of Kansas City.
Speaker: So I looked this up on the map.
Speaker: It's not really that close to Kansas City.
Speaker: They say it's right outside.
Speaker: It's like an hour away.
Speaker: So Jasper, a town near Kansas City.
Speaker: I'm from Kansas City.
Speaker: So that's another reason I like this movie.
Speaker: Kind of takes place in KC.
Speaker: And he offers to pay Dalton.
Speaker: $500 a day.
Speaker: Yeah, for $500 a night plus $5,000 up front and all medical expenses paid.
Speaker: So this is 1989.
Speaker: So in $23, I'd probably be like over $300,000 a year for his bouncing services.
Speaker: So we soon find out why.
Speaker: So Dalton takes this job.
Speaker: And we find out why he's being paid so much, which is this bar is basically like a guaranteed broken bone when you walk inside.
Speaker: They often refer to it as a slaughterhouse.
Speaker: It is a slaughterhouse.
Speaker: And it is.
Speaker: So Dalton takes on this challenge she's working on.
Speaker: kind of cleaning up this bar, but he has another enemy to contend with, which is that in a town that he's in, Jasper, this town is sort of ruled by an extremely wealthy citizen who has decided to treat the town like his own personal mob.
Speaker: Yeah, so he charges them protection money.
Speaker: He's collecting all these fees from the various business owners.
Speaker: He basically runs the town and he's Brad Wesley.
Speaker: He's a bad dude.
Speaker: He's a bad man.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So Dalton now not only has to fix up this bar and train the people working in the bar on how to keep it a peaceful establishment, he also has to fight against the unofficial rulers of the town, Brad Wesley and his goons, I guess.
Speaker: And he's doing all of this while falling head over heels in love with a beautiful doctor.
Speaker: Yeah, that's good.
Speaker: We don't want to give too much away.
Speaker: That's a basic plot like.
Speaker: I think there's not going to be any major spoilers in this episode.
Speaker: Is that right?
Speaker: I'm not sure.
Speaker: There may be spoilers.
Speaker: We can't promise anything.
Speaker: The ending's not great.
Speaker: I'm not going to spoil the ending for listeners who want to go and watch it.
Speaker: I think if they had ended the movie like 15 minutes before the actual ending or maybe 20, it would have been great.
Speaker: But I think as it was, the ending didn't work.
Speaker: However, that, in my opinion, doesn't ruin the rest of the movie because...
Speaker: what we're about to talk about, the movie is just rich with philosophical content.
Speaker: So let me start us off talking about the first scene of the movie where it's really revealed to us that we are about to have the philosophy of Patrick Swayze, or I guess properly the philosophy of Dalton the bouncer.
Speaker: All right, so scene number one.
Speaker: We call this the three rules scene.
Speaker: So Dalton gets to this new bar, the double deuce,
Speaker: And one of the things he has to do is he has to kind of retrain the employees, the employees that are left.
Speaker: He fired a bunch of them.
Speaker: But the employees that remain, he has to retrain them in what to do when it looks like violence is about to start breaking out in the bar.
Speaker: So I'm going to read you this scene.
Speaker: This is what he tells the employees about how to handle potentially violent situations.
Speaker: He says, all you have to do is follow three simple rules.
Speaker: One, never underestimate your opponent.
Speaker: Expect the unexpected.
Speaker: Two, take it outside.
Speaker: Never start anything inside the bar unless it's absolutely necessary.
Speaker: And three, be nice.
Speaker: He goes on.
Speaker: I want you to be nice until it's time to not be nice.
Speaker: An employee responds, how do we know when that is?
Speaker: And he says, you won't.
Speaker: I'll let you know.
Speaker: You are the bouncers.
Speaker: I am the cooler.
Speaker: Yeah, this term cooler, I've never heard this term in my life until this movie.
Speaker: So I guess the cooler is like the head bouncer that kind of like hangs out in the back and assesses the situation.
Speaker: And he'll make these sorts of strategic decisions.
Speaker: He'll employ two bouncers over there if it's necessary, two bouncers over there if it's necessary.
Speaker: That's his role.
Speaker: I guess it makes sense because you don't want to you want to bounce as few people as possible.
Speaker: I mean, they're paying customers.
Speaker: So you'd rather cool them down.
Speaker: So, Frank, what do you think about these three rules that Dalton gives the employees of the double deuce?
Speaker: Yeah, well, I guess one thing I thought of when I heard Dalton say this is that he's really trying to make bouncing be like a profession, you
Speaker: You know, he's trying to professionalize bouncing.
Speaker: He even gets them all uniform.
Speaker: Yeah, he gets them all uniform.
Speaker: So I think we think of, you know, bouncing as just a sort of they're hired guns.
Speaker: They're just doing their job.
Speaker: And I think Patrick Swayze, as Dalton, wants to take bouncing to a higher level.
Speaker: He wants to make it a profession.
Speaker: He wants to give them a code of ethics.
Speaker: I mean, that's probably one of the hallmarks of a profession is that there's a kind of ethics code.
Speaker: So I find it really interesting that he gives them this set of rules for conduct, but he kind of, in a way, the rules aren't, I mean, they're informative, but they don't have a lot of depth, right?
Speaker: Because he's not actually conferring wisdom to these employees.
Speaker: He's not really teaching them how to make good judgments about situations themselves.
Speaker: More just rules for conduct.
Speaker: And then he sort of separates himself as the person who has this kind of wisdom, this innate knowledge on, you know, how to know when a situation needs to be, when someone needs to be bounced or when they don't.
Speaker: Yeah, he's like the philosopher.
Speaker: I really like that comment that the employee makes.
Speaker: How do we know when there's an exception to this rule?
Speaker: How do we know when it's time?
Speaker: He's like, I don't have time to train you in that.
Speaker: Yeah, so he's like, I will be the guy that has the practical wisdom.
Speaker: You ask me.
Speaker: I'm the ethical expert.
Speaker: I'm the virtuous agent here.
Speaker: I will decide how the rules are applied.
Speaker: But I think that's a good question that the guy asks, the employee.
Speaker: And I think that shows the kind of limitation of thinking of morality ethics as just encapsulated in like a code of rules, right?
Speaker: Because there's going to be situations that are difficult to deal with.
Speaker: And there's situations where you're not sure how the rules apply.
Speaker: And, well, what do you want to do?
Speaker: You want to say there's a further rule that tells you how the rules apply?
Speaker: then it looks like you're headed to an infinite regress, right?
Speaker: You have a rule about the rules.
Speaker: Well, you need a rule about how that meta rule applies.
Speaker: And a way to stop the regress, it seems, is just sort of to have this kind of wisdom with respect to how the rules are applied.
Speaker: Those employees don't have that, but Patrick Swayze, at least he thinks he does.
Speaker: And as the movie would play out, he in fact does.
Speaker: Now, one of the rules that doesn't really go over great with the employees is the third rule, be nice.
Speaker: He says, be nice until it's time to not be nice.
Speaker: And clearly that the point at which it's time to not be nice is much further along than the employees would have assumed, the other employees would have assumed.
Speaker: So Patrick Swayze's character, Dalton, is often the he often gets like horrible insults hurled at him, obviously in an attempt to make him mad.
Speaker: People are trying to start a fight with him.
Speaker: And he just they roll off of him like raindrops on a waxed car surface.
Speaker: It's as though he doesn't even hear them.
Speaker: And he keeps being nice because I guess they're just words.
Speaker: Words, words aren't fists thrown yet.
Speaker: And he wants to prevent this from being thrown.
Speaker: And so the best way to do this, at least he seems to think, is to just be nice, not let insults make him ragey.
Speaker: And and another employee questions him.
Speaker: He says, well, what if he calls my mom a bad word?
Speaker: And and Patrick Swayze's character basically says, look, even that it doesn't matter what they say.
Speaker: Be nice about it.
Speaker: This might be too obvious of an interpretation, but throughout the movie, I get the sense that Patrick Swayze wants to kind of be this stoic sage, someone who can accurately assess the objective situation and respond with equanimity, not respond with these harmful passions.
Speaker: And I think he conveys this in this scene, too.
Speaker: I'm reminded of one of these famous lines from Epictetus, the Roman Stoic philosopher, in his Enchiridion.
Speaker: I think this is the first passage.
Speaker: He says something like, when you are confronted with some harsh appearance, a harsh impression, tell yourself, you are nothing more than an impression.
Speaker: That is all that you are, something like that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So be aware of this appearance-reality distinction and respond appropriately to the situation.
Speaker: There's the event and then your judgment about the event, he says elsewhere.
Speaker: I think Patrick Swayze is trying to convey this idea here.
Speaker: I think there's other senses in which he conveys this image of himself as a would-be Stoic sage.
Speaker: And in fact, in the next scene that we're going to talk about as well, I think we see this also happening.
Speaker: Yeah, so this next scene that we're going to talk about is probably my favorite scene in the whole movie.
Speaker: It's a really excellent scene.
Speaker: So at one point, Dalton, Patrick Swayze's character Dalton, gets a knife wound because in this job you're not going to get out totally unscathed.
Speaker: So he gets a knife wound and he goes to the hospital to get it fixed up, which is where he meets his love interest, Dr. Elizabeth Clay.
Speaker: Elizabeth Clay, who we often refer as affectionately as just Doc.
Speaker: Doc.
Speaker: That's where he needs Doc.
Speaker: And so she's got him on the table.
Speaker: She's fixing him up, getting ready to... So I guess she cleans the wound and then she goes in to staple it.
Speaker: It's such a deep wound.
Speaker: She can't even do stitches.
Speaker: She has to use staples.
Speaker: And she fills a syringe with anesthetic, local anesthetic, and he refuses it.
Speaker: He doesn't want his arm to be numbed while she staples up his knife wound.
Speaker: So she says, she kind of smirks and she said, do you enjoy pain?
Speaker: And he says, pain don't hurt.
Speaker: Probably one of those famous lines in the movie.
Speaker: Pain don't hurt.
Speaker: And she says, most of my patients would disagree with you.
Speaker: So I love this because one of my favorite philosophical topics to think about is pain.
Speaker: It's actually a really, really interesting topic.
Speaker: And there's a lot here.
Speaker: So before getting that, I just have to say, right, I mean, pain don't hurt.
Speaker: That seems just obviously false.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It seems obviously false, but I think there's actually a seed of truth to this.
Speaker: So you were saying, right, that it seems like Dalton is sort of playing this role of the stoic stage throughout the movie.
Speaker: So this can definitely be a manifestation of that, right?
Speaker: That he's maybe...
Speaker: achieved such a high level of stoicism that he can undergo these really excruciatingly painful experiences and not react to them.
Speaker: But I think that there's another way that you could take this.
Speaker: So one interesting fact about a well-known kind of painkiller, morphine,
Speaker: People often get morphine for severe pain, like after a surgery, something like that.
Speaker: But the interesting thing about morphine is that a lot of people, most people actually who get morphine, do not report that they feel any different after the morphine.
Speaker: That is, their wound or whatever feels the same.
Speaker: But notably, they do stop screaming and writhing and shouting for painkillers.
Speaker: So there's something that morphine seems like it does, which is that it separates this inclination to get away from whatever's causing this sensation from the sensation itself.
Speaker: which, you know, one might describe as pain and not hurting.
Speaker: I mean, maybe that wouldn't be the most accurate way of describing it, but it kind of gets the idea.
Speaker: Yeah, isn't it in that case that like the pain hurts, they just don't care, right?
Speaker: It seems like there's like two things that we often conflate, right?
Speaker: There's like the sensation itself or the pure phenomenology.
Speaker: And then there's like our attitude that we take toward that phenomenology.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: But what is hurt?
Speaker: Is hurt the sensation itself or is it the desire to get away from it?
Speaker: Yeah, I guess it's kind of ambiguous, right?
Speaker: So is Patrick Swayze saying in that scene that he doesn't feel that ouchy feeling?
Speaker: I mean, that would be... Yeah, I don't think that's it.
Speaker: So he feels the ouchy feeling and he just, he takes an attitude of what?
Speaker: Like, this is not a big deal?
Speaker: Total acceptance.
Speaker: Total acceptance, right.
Speaker: Yeah, so this is an interesting topic when it comes to the Stoics, right?
Speaker: So the Stoics are, Stoic philosophy is pretty popular these days, you know, resurgence among the business class.
Speaker: I'm not sure why, but the corporate elites really love Stoicism.
Speaker: But putting that aside, this is an interesting topic when it comes to Stoicism.
Speaker: Does the Stoic sage, the person who has achieved the highest state according to Stoicism, does that person feel pain?
Speaker: So if you look at what the Stoics say, so people like Seneca, first century philosopher and tutor to the emperor Nero, Epictetus, second century philosopher I've mentioned before, and the perhaps most famous Stoic Marcus Aurelius, second century Roman emperor,
Speaker: When you look at what they say, it does seem like they're saying this, that if you are a good Stoic, you won't feel pain.
Speaker: So just to take one of these quotes, so here's Marcus Aurelius.
Speaker: Take away thy opinion, and then there is taken away the complaint.
Speaker: I have been harmed.
Speaker: Take away the complaint.
Speaker: I have been harmed, and the harm is taken away.
Speaker: Easy as that, right?
Speaker: If you just have the right attitude toward the hurts, toward the wound, you won't feel the sense, you won't feel the ouchy feeling.
Speaker: So that sounds kind of crazy.
Speaker: Well, I don't know.
Speaker: Because they're still human, right?
Speaker: I interpret the word harm there not as referring to the ouchy feeling, but it seems like at least one could read them as saying it's the impression that harms.
Speaker: So Marcus Aurelius says, take away the... Take away the opinion.
Speaker: Take away the idea that this is bad, right?
Speaker: I get the knife wound and I think to myself, wow, this is bad.
Speaker: And then he says the harm will be taken away.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So in that sense, it seems like what he's saying is the opinion is what's harmful, not the knife wound.
Speaker: But do you think the Stoic sage still feels the ouchy feeling?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So they still feel the ouchy.
Speaker: So they're not like superhuman.
Speaker: They still feel the ouchy feeling.
Speaker: But because they have the right attitude toward it, they don't react to the pain stimulus in the way that we ordinary, mortal, unwise, non-Stoic sages do.
Speaker: Is that the idea?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: I'm not a Stoicism scholar, so any listener out there who is can correct me on that.
Speaker: Well, I will note in that scene, if you pay attention, when Patrick Swayze gets the staples in his side, he does wince.
Speaker: He winces!
Speaker: He winces.
Speaker: So that's some evidence that he's still feeling that ouchy feeling, even if he does have the equanimity that is characteristic of the Stoic sage.
Speaker: He doesn't say anything.
Speaker: He doesn't say, oh, woe is me or anything like that.
Speaker: He does wince.
Speaker: So maybe, I'm not a Stoicism scholar either, but maybe the Stoics can say that, well, there's no avoiding the ouchy feeling.
Speaker: We're human.
Speaker: You can't avoid being hungry.
Speaker: You can't avoid needing water, feeling thirst.
Speaker: You can't avoid the ouchy feeling that we get when our bodily tissue is damaged.
Speaker: And in fact, Epictetus says in the first line of the Enchiridion, he talks about the things that are not within our control.
Speaker: And he does include the body as something that's not within our control.
Speaker: So Stoics say, only care about those things that are in your control.
Speaker: So maybe they can say, well, pan is not in your control, the ouchy feeling.
Speaker: But the attitude that we take toward it is.
Speaker: And you can get yourself to such a state that you will react with dignity when you are seriously wounded.
Speaker: And you can be calm to some degree, even if you do feel the ouchy feeling.
Speaker: Well, then on your interpretation, then we shouldn't call morphine a painkiller.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe not.
Speaker: I mean, if they still feel the ouchy feeling and they just are OK with it, they just have they just have the they don't have the attitude.
Speaker: But is there a single thing that is the ouchy feeling?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, this is a good question, right?
Speaker: So we do talk about pain.
Speaker: We sort of talk about this as like a category that applies to lots of different things.
Speaker: The pain of loss, like grief, is a kind of pain.
Speaker: But also stubbing your toe is a kind of pain.
Speaker: Getting a paper cut is a kind of pain.
Speaker: Having headaches is a kind of pain.
Speaker: Watching a really bad movie might be a pain.
Speaker: Being sore from a workout is a pain.
Speaker: So, yeah, I guess one might raise the question, is this really like a category?
Speaker: Is this like a natural category, like the category gold?
Speaker: So we know what things are gold, right?
Speaker: They're things that have atomic number 79.
Speaker: I think it is, right?
Speaker: Whatever.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's it.
Speaker: I forget.
Speaker: It's a stock example of velocity.
Speaker: I forgot.
Speaker: But I think it is atomic number 79.
Speaker: So if you're a substance and you satisfy these properties, then you're gold.
Speaker: But is pain like that or is pain just sort of this weird catch-all category that doesn't really pick out one single phenomenon?
Speaker: It's just like experiences we don't like and we wish they would end.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe that's ultimately what we're saying there, but that is not a very informative or unified category.
Speaker: Well, further, it means that what pain is, is the desire to get away from the thing, in which case morphine would be a painkiller.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess if you define pain functionally like that, so that something's pain if we want to get away from it, and if you get morphine and you no longer want to get away from the thing, then it's not a pain, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's how Michael Tai at UT Austin talks about pain.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But I think there's this tendency, back to whether this is like a natural kind, I think there is this tendency in philosophy to think of pain and pleasure as these sorts of simple phenomena.
Speaker: We know what pain is, we know what pleasure is, and it's a feeling we can get from various sources of different kinds.
Speaker: I mean, when you look at Jeremy Bentham, famous utilitarian 18th century,
Speaker: So he thought that we were driven in all that we do by trying to avoid pain and trying to achieve pleasure.
Speaker: He calls these our sovereign masters.
Speaker: And he gives this interesting list of the different kinds of pains and pleasures.
Speaker: And they're so varied as to be kind of absurd.
Speaker: So I'll read some of these things.
Speaker: I find this kind of amusing.
Speaker: So he says, look, there's lots of different pleasures.
Speaker: There's the pleasure of skill, the pleasure of a good name, the pleasure of benevolence, the pleasure of memory, the pleasure of relief, the pleasure of expectation.
Speaker: Lots of different things.
Speaker: And there's different pains.
Speaker: The pains of awkwardness, the pains of enmity, the pains of an ill name, the pains of piety.
Speaker: I'm not sure what he means by that.
Speaker: It's like you go to church too much and you're pained by it.
Speaker: The pains of privation.
Speaker: So yeah, these are all just sort of really, really different, right?
Speaker: When you think about the feeling you have when you get a bad grade and it tests or something like that or some other disappointment in your professional life and the feeling you get when you stub your toe.
Speaker: Those don't really seem like they have a lot in common.
Speaker: It'd be weird to call both those things the same sort of sensation, the same sort of phenomenon.
Speaker: But we do it, right?
Speaker: We say these are, at least in philosophy, we do it.
Speaker: We say those are the pains, stuff that Bentham listed over there, and those are the pleasures, the stuff that Bentham listed before.
Speaker: Well, is there a problem with doing this?
Speaker: I guess, what's the big deal, one might say?
Speaker: So, oh, look, you're saying these aren't natural, clean categories like gold or water or something like that.
Speaker: But is there a problem, do you think, Megan, with having these kind of awkward, disunified categories of pains and pleasures?
Speaker: Does this have ill effects on our moral theorizing or our practical life?
Speaker: I think it can.
Speaker: One way that it can is that a pretty wide assumption among philosophers, one that I personally do not share, is that pain is intrinsically bad.
Speaker: Even if you're not a utilitarian or a hedonist, you probably still think pain is intrinsically bad.
Speaker: Lots of arguments hinge on this being true.
Speaker: But in order to get that premise off the ground, we need to have kind of an idea of what pain is.
Speaker: So if the best way of defining pain is functionally, right, we kind of group everything together that we want to call pain.
Speaker: We look for a common feature.
Speaker: And that common feature is that, like, we want to get away from it.
Speaker: We don't like it, something like that.
Speaker: And then we adopt this kind of functional understanding of pain, that pain is the sensations that produce a push to get away from them.
Speaker: It's hard to look at that and say that that's intrinsically bad.
Speaker: Why?
Speaker: Because it's completely crucial to our survival as a species.
Speaker: Some people have conditions where they cannot feel pain.
Speaker: Presumably they feel the sensations of being stung by a thousand fire ants, but they don't have that drive to get away from it.
Speaker: And they have very short life expectancies because they often sustain really terrible injuries that they just don't feel the push to go get treated.
Speaker: So this sort of function seems like a natural function.
Speaker: It seems actually like a helpful function.
Speaker: That's not bad.
Speaker: So what is it about pain that's bad?
Speaker: And saying anything more than that is actually kind of tricky.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess some people might say, well, often we feel more pain that is necessary to reveal that something is wrong, right?
Speaker: So this often arises in discussions in philosophy of religion about the problem of evil.
Speaker: So the problem of evil is, well, in a nutshell, it's like, how can the world be as it is with all this evil and suffering that seems unnecessary if there's an all-powerful, all-good, all-knowing God?
Speaker: And yeah, so the people who defend this argument, they'll say,
Speaker: Maybe in response to what you've said, Megan, that, you know, God could have made it so that we don't feel as much pain as we do.
Speaker: Like, it's like, oh, yeah, I got the I get the point.
Speaker: I have a toothache.
Speaker: I'm going to go to the dentist.
Speaker: I don't need to feel this ouchy feeling anymore.
Speaker: It's already done its job.
Speaker: Can't can't God just like make the pains not as like last as long and be as as difficult to bear?
Speaker: Yeah, so obviously it seems like that should be a possibility.
Speaker: One tricky aspect of this proposal, though, is so people who do have this condition where they can't feel pain, because it's actually such a dangerous condition to have, medical scientists have experimented with lots of different artificial pain systems.
Speaker: where when there's some sort of injury to the flesh or something like that, the artificial pain system will cause pain, do something in the brain of the person to make them feel some kind of pain or some kind of unpleasantness when that happens.
Speaker: But there's there's a disconnect between whatever's causing their injury and whatever unpleasant feeling they're getting from this artificial pain unit.
Speaker: And the results have been really poor.
Speaker: People just simply don't respond well enough, quickly enough or strongly enough to the injuries.
Speaker: Yeah, that's interesting.
Speaker: Well, maybe next time I'm in pain, I'll think to myself, well, at least my body is functioning correctly.
Speaker: And I'll see if that sort of extinguishes the ouchy feeling a little bit.
Speaker: See if that brings you any comfort.
Speaker: So this scene continues on.
Speaker: That's not the end of the scene.
Speaker: The scene has a lot of really great stuff in it.
Speaker: So Dalton's getting stapled up.
Speaker: He says pain don't hurt.
Speaker: And the doctor continues to try to make a
Speaker: conversation with them, obviously, because they are both extremely attracted to one another.
Speaker: So they want to keep talking.
Speaker: So the doctor says, I don't know why this would be in Dalton's medical file, but she says, your file says you've got a degree from NYU.
Speaker: And then he drops the bombshell.
Speaker: What in?
Speaker: Philosophy.
Speaker: Philosophy.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: Patrick Swayze.
Speaker: He's one of us.
Speaker: He's a philosopher.
Speaker: So she says, any particular discipline.
Speaker: And he says, no, not really.
Speaker: Man's search for faith, that sort of
Speaker: Crap.
Speaker: Crap.
Speaker: This is a family friendly podcast.
Speaker: Family friendly podcast.
Speaker: And she says, did you come up with any answers?
Speaker: And he sort of laughed and he said, not too many.
Speaker: She goes, how's a guy like you end up a bouncer?
Speaker: And he goes, just lucky, I guess.
Speaker: Yeah, it's kind of like the opposite of what Wittgenstein did.
Speaker: Wittgenstein, the 20th century philosopher, when he thought he solved all philosophy, he abandoned it.
Speaker: In this case, Patrick Swayze tried philosophy out, but he didn't come up with any answers.
Speaker: I guess he focused really on this one particular question that you might think is the root of philosophy, which is the root of philosophy.
Speaker: The most important question there is, what makes life meaningful?
Speaker: But actually, a lot of philosophers don't really think about that question too much these days.
Speaker: I don't have much to say about that.
Speaker: That question is kind of disregarded as a silly question.
Speaker: So maybe Patrick Swayze, when he went to NYU in the 80s, they were too interested in the problem of free will or causation.
Speaker: And they didn't answer his question of what's the meaning of life.
Speaker: And he's left cold and decided to abandon philosophy.
Speaker: Yeah, there's this great book by the author W. Somerset Maugham called The Razor's Edge, where the main character, Larry, he kind of undergoes the same career shift, I guess.
Speaker: He's a wealthy kid from a wealthy family, and he really wants to figure out the meaning of life and learn all these deep truths.
Speaker: So he goes to study philosophy and study all these other disciplines at various universities, and he can't figure anything out.
Speaker: He's left with more questions than answers, and he's just in agony.
Speaker: lacking these answers.
Speaker: And so in his desperation, he decides to become a miner.
Speaker: Someone works in the coal mines, not like a 17-year-old.
Speaker: Sorry.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: He does not decide to age backwards.
Speaker: He decides to work in a coal mine, obviously something that is, you know, quote unquote, beneath him as a member of high society.
Speaker: And the result is that he becomes content and life is these answers are sort of clarified to him through, I guess, his physical, what we might call like menial labor.
Speaker: And it kind of seems here like that's what Dalton is getting at, that there's something clear.
Speaker: He says he's lucky to be a bouncer.
Speaker: I don't really know if he's saying that tongue in cheek, but I think he's not.
Speaker: I think.
Speaker: that there is something for him that's clarifying in his, you know, maybe menial physical labor as a bouncer that was not clarified in his studies.
Speaker: Yeah, when he said that line, how I interpreted him was saying, well, yeah, I tried the contemplative life and I didn't like it.
Speaker: So I decided to opt for the active life instead.
Speaker: He's still clearly contemplative, though.
Speaker: I mean, I think maybe he just rejects like the academic life.
Speaker: Yeah, I guess when he goes to the bar, when he goes to the Double Deuce for the first time, he doesn't tell the employees who he is.
Speaker: And he's just there in the corner drinking coffee.
Speaker: And he's just observing the situation, very perceptive.
Speaker: So there's, I guess there is that, that's true.
Speaker: Yeah, this discussion of the meaning of life thing reminds me of another scene toward the middle of the movie before the bad guy starts trying to exact revenge on Dalton.
Speaker: So Brad Wesley...
Speaker: meets with Dalton, he wants to get Dalton on his side, he wants to come to have Dalton work for him.
Speaker: Of course, Dalton, noble, stoic sage that he is, rejects this offer.
Speaker: He says no amount of money would get him to work for the bad guy.
Speaker: And in this scene, the bad guy says some pretty, like, I guess you might describe it as like pseudo philosophical.
Speaker: It's the kind of like villainous philosophical thing that you'd expect a bad guy to say.
Speaker: Villain philosophy.
Speaker: Yeah, villain philosophy, bad thing.
Speaker: And he says, when Patrick Swayze is like, well, why are you such a bad dude?
Speaker: Like, why are you mistreating everyone?
Speaker: Why are you charging people protection money?
Speaker: Brad Wesley, bad dude, says the following.
Speaker: I believe we all have a purpose on this earth, a destiny.
Speaker: I have a faith in that destiny.
Speaker: It tells me to gather unto me what is mine.
Speaker: So, yeah, that sounds like the kind of comically villainous thing that a bad guy would say.
Speaker: It's actually pretty, I mean, it's not like, I think it's pretty common for people who are trying to take over a large chunk of land to believe in manifest destiny to justify it.
Speaker: Well, yeah, that's true.
Speaker: One thing he does say is before he says this line, he says, look, when I came to Jasper, the little town right outside of Kansas City, there was nothing here.
Speaker: And he's like, I brought I brought the movie theater to town.
Speaker: I'm going to bring J.C.
Speaker: Penney to the town.
Speaker: That's how old this movie is.
Speaker: He is lauding the fact that he's going to bring J.C.
Speaker: Penney to the small town Jasper.
Speaker: So yeah, he mixed his labor with this land, right?
Speaker: And he thinks he has some kind of entitlement to it.
Speaker: Yeah, this Mad Best Destiny is a good reference to this.
Speaker: But yeah, I thought this was kind of interesting.
Speaker: He thinks it's part of his destiny to gather unto him what is his, he thinks.
Speaker: How can we make sense of this further?
Speaker: I don't know, it kind of reminds me of something like Nietzsche might think.
Speaker: So Nietzsche, 19th century German philosopher, we talked about it before.
Speaker: He's famous for this idea that conventional morality,
Speaker: the kinds of things that you learn at your mother's knee, don't lie, don't steal, don't cheat, that sort of stuff.
Speaker: That can be stifling to great spirits.
Speaker: Often, great spirits need to defy conventional morality in order to do the great things that they want to do.
Speaker: If everyone adhered to these conventional moral standards, life would be really, really dull.
Speaker: There wouldn't be a lot of greatness in the world.
Speaker: And so, yeah, maybe this Brad Wesley guy thinks something similar.
Speaker: Of course, it's a little bit unfair for him to charge protection money to the local guys.
Speaker: But, you know, he has great plans for this town, the town of Jasper.
Speaker: He's bringing J.C.
Speaker: Penny there.
Speaker: So, yeah, and defying these conventional standards is justified by the fact that he is going to do great things.
Speaker: All right, so there's one more little philosophical nugget in this scene.
Speaker: The doctor asks him, upon learning he's a bouncer, she asked him, do you ever win a fight?
Speaker: And Dalton responds, nobody ever wins a fight.
Speaker: Yeah, I really like that line because I think it suggests that Dalton, although he's an action hero, he's beaten people up, really he wants to be a pacifist.
Speaker: He might even think of himself as a kind of pacifist.
Speaker: Yeah, it's almost like Dalton has to kind of take this burden of badness, you know, the necessity of sometimes fighting upon himself for the good of minimizing fighting in general.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, let's talk about pacifism in general.
Speaker: Let's take a step back here.
Speaker: So it's like there's different.
Speaker: What do we mean by pacifism?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I know.
Speaker: I wouldn't immediately intuitively classify Dalton as a pacifist because, of course, he does sometimes fight.
Speaker: And especially at the end of the movie, he does a lot of fighting.
Speaker: But there is something pacifistic about his approach to the world, right?
Speaker: His approach to the world to try to minimize violence as much as possible.
Speaker: So I guess there is a sense in which Dalton is pacifistic, although I think I might stop short of calling him a pacifist.
Speaker: Well, I guess a lot depends on what you mean by pacifist.
Speaker: I think in popular discourse, by pacifist, we mean someone who is absolutely in all circumstances opposed to killing, at the very least, and maybe even all violence.
Speaker: But philosophers like to make distinctions, and you can make a lot of distinctions here when it comes to pacifism.
Speaker: Maybe pacifism means pacifism.
Speaker: Just no killing, but the violence is OK.
Speaker: Or even if you think violence is not OK, you could be a pacifist that thinks that coercion is OK.
Speaker: So maybe Patrick Swayze shouldn't be punching people in the face, but maybe it's OK for him to get them in a headlock or something like that.
Speaker: So coercion is OK, but not violence.
Speaker: So, yeah, we can think of different kinds of pacifisms, different levels of severity, too.
Speaker: What about epistemic violence?
Speaker: Is that OK?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I love that.
Speaker: I'm cutting that out.
Speaker: No, that's funny.
Speaker: But there's different levels of severity, too.
Speaker: So the pacifism in the ordinary sense, I think, suggests never do violence, never kill.
Speaker: But you might think that there's some exceptions.
Speaker: Maybe self-defense is an exception.
Speaker: Or maybe you think that it's okay to use violence for morally noble ends, but there's a strong presumption against it.
Speaker: So we can think there's lots of different, there's lots of rooms to carve out different categories.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Maybe there's like degrees of pacifism.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But what I think is really interesting is, um, so he says nobody ever wins a fight.
Speaker: Meaning like, even if you do, you know, beat the guy up and, and,
Speaker: and he loses, you still haven't won.
Speaker: So why would he think that you still haven't won?
Speaker: I mean, I guess the idea is that being engaged in violence, whether or not you do think it's ever permissible, because you might think violence is sometimes permissible, but still that it takes something from you, that it doesn't ever really benefit you, that it harms you in some way, even if it was done permissibly and even if you were successful.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that's a very good point.
Speaker: And I think you can apply that to soldiers, right, in the military.
Speaker: Oh, yeah.
Speaker: So, yeah, even if you think your cause is just, the war is just, there's still this kind of moral cost to the soldiers fighting the war.
Speaker: Their moral integrity, maybe they didn't really want to kill someone, but they thought it was their duty.
Speaker: They still have to deal with that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, you know, Martha Nussbaum talks about these things a lot in Fragility of Goodness, just that how like situations outside our control can compel us into actions that, you know, maybe aren't strictly speaking impermissible, but sort of like degrade our integrity as individual cells.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I think there's a lot of evidence that Dalton is a pacifist in this movie.
Speaker: So we just discussed that line that nobody ever wins a fight.
Speaker: In the beginning of the movie, there's a guy taunting him and he doesn't fight him.
Speaker: He just throws him outside.
Speaker: We have the be nice speech.
Speaker: That's one of the main rules that we discussed before.
Speaker: And one theme that sort of drives a lot of the action in the movie that we haven't discussed yet is that Patrick Swayze, Dalton, keep saying Patrick Swayze, but that's because Patrick Swayze is larger than life figure.
Speaker: But Dalton, he has a kind of dark past.
Speaker: He once killed a man in self-defense and he's still broken up about it.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: That kind of drives his career as a bouncer, weirdly.
Speaker: Maybe that seems counterintuitive, but right.
Speaker: So he once killed a man.
Speaker: I really destroyed him.
Speaker: And now kind of his goal in life is to decrease violence in maybe these like really violent places.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so if he thought that it was in self-defense, I mean, yeah, he says it was, but he's still broken up about it.
Speaker: Maybe that suggests that he even thinks that the self-defense reason isn't a good reason.
Speaker: Maybe he just thinks like questions of permissibility or impermissibility are inapt once you, when you're talking about these kinds of things, that one should be broken up about it, whether or not it was morally justified.
Speaker: Well, I guess the manner in which he killed the guy is pretty gruesome, right?
Speaker: So he ripped his throat out.
Speaker: Is that even possible?
Speaker: It's not, no.
Speaker: It's not scientifically possible?
Speaker: I'm going to say no.
Speaker: Yeah, I want to go back to that scene, though, with when he's talking to Brad Wesley, the bad guy.
Speaker: So there's another line in that scene that I think speaks to what we're talking about now.
Speaker: So Brad Wesley says to Dalton, he's like, I know you love what you do.
Speaker: I know you love being a bouncer.
Speaker: I know you love beating people up.
Speaker: He says, you wouldn't be human if you didn't.
Speaker: And I thought that was pretty interesting.
Speaker: It kind of suggests this idea that, well, we know throughout history, like martial virtues, virtues of war, were valorized in the ancient world.
Speaker: Or being a warrior was supposed to be a great sort of thing.
Speaker: And it raises this kind of uncomfortable question that maybe there's some truth to what this guy is saying, that there's this kind of element of human nature that won't allow it to be entirely pacifistic.
Speaker: We have these kinds of aggressive impulses and there needs to be some outlet for them.
Speaker: Now, of course, we don't want to say the outlet is war.
Speaker: That would be bad.
Speaker: We should try to avoid war as much as possible.
Speaker: But I mean, football, football.
Speaker: I mean, yeah, like people really like football.
Speaker: That is, you might think that's the modern.
Speaker: Gladiatorial fight.
Speaker: That's the modern day equivalent of a gladiatorial fight.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm reminded of like Heraclitus, ancient philosophers, of war is the father of all things.
Speaker: Maybe, maybe this guy's right, this bad dude.
Speaker: Like there's something about us.
Speaker: We can't extinguish it completely.
Speaker: Ayak, and Frank knows this, but this is actually my interpretation of the driving theme of the movie, which is that Dalton, and again, I'm trying not to give any spoilers about the end, but Dalton is trying throughout the whole movie to kind of suspend this aspect of human nature in himself.
Speaker: And in some ways, I don't think it's a failure, or sorry, I don't think it's a spoiler to say, in some ways he fails to do that.
Speaker: We certainly see the limits of nonviolence in this movie.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But then, of course, there's still this open question.
Speaker: Should we be or should we try to be total pacifists?
Speaker: Should we try to succeed at what Dalton in some ways failed to do or not?
Speaker: Is Nietzsche right that maybe human health is different than the moralists conceive and maybe indulging this aspect of human nature is healthy?
Speaker: Yeah, to think about.
Speaker: A question for another episode.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're out of time for today.
Speaker: Thanks so much for listening.
Speaker: And please tune in to our next episode where we will be talking about polytheism.
